In a modern corporation, computer-related assets carry significant cost. The dynamic nature of application and system software dictates the need for periodic upgrades and/or replacements of the hardware. A blanket approach—i.e., upgrade all machines—may carry with it prohibitive cost. Thus comes the necessity to collect a detailed and timely inventory of the hardware components of the corporate computers as a basis for the targeted upgrade and replacement decisions.
Today's computers include a multitude of expensive components, like video or sound cards, external CD/DVD readers/burners, LCD monitors, docking stations, etc, which can be transferred or reallocated independently of the main computer unit. Improper or unauthorized transfer of these components may incur significant cost to the company. To avoid or mitigate this cost, a desired inventory solution should be able to properly identify and inventory a variety of components and devices representing or attached to the computer. This solution should also be flexible enough to provide a mechanism for inventorying hardware and software components unknown at the time of the design or initial implementation of the desired inventory solution.
Computers are designed to run system and application programs. The nature of computer programs is such that they may have bugs, which manifest themselves only under certain circumstances on particular configurations of hardware and software components. To identify and mitigate these occurrences, it is important to have a detailed and timely inventory of the hardware and software components comprising the computing environment of a corporation. The same pertains to identification and isolation of some forms of malicious software (i.e., computer viruses).
A significant portion of the cost associated with the management of a computer network represents license fees paid to the manufacturers of the application software deployed on the corporate computers. Thus, it becomes an important part of cost management to properly account for various software components installed on corporate computers and cross-reference software installation with the actual software usage.
Corporate computer networks are usually geographically distributed with various segments that interconnected using some control mechanisms, such as protocol filtering, firewalls, etc. A corporate-wide computer assets inventory system should be able to transparently bridge various network segments and consolidate all inventory information for centralized analysis.
Existing pure inventory or inventory-capable systems fall short of embracing all of the requirements stated above. Thus, there exists a need in the prior art for a method and system to identify and conduct an inventory of computer assets on a network that provides for greater scalability, more flexibility in terms of logging and error discovery, and the ability to communicate through firewalls, if necessary.